#hws manchuria

[tianshiisdead]

Jurchen Shaman

[irithnova]

Hey guys I wrote an F/F/M Manmonchu Qing Dynasty threesome fic lol

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

[stirringwinds]

Hi! I saw some of your hws China thoughts lately and they were really fun to read, it's always especially interesting to see takes from other sino related people 😆 Do you think Manchu(ria) would be a separate figure (from Wang Yao) during the Qing dynasty, or do you think the Jurchen tribes would've just been absorbed along the way? People always have such different takes on it so I'm curious to know your thoughts.

hey, thanks for this question! :-) i do enjoy thinking about yao's characterisation, even more so in relation to other nations. this is my view of it:

i'm personally inclined to see manchuria as a separate personification during the qing dynasty (though i admittedly haven't developed a detailed idea of their character/personality). i've previously written scenes in the aftermath of the opium wars where yao was at the signing of the treaty of nanking (for example)—but i see it as a situation where yao is rather being ordered around by manchuria (and the humans think yao is a qing official). my thought process is that while the manchu rulers may have adopted certain aspects of han chinese culture to bolster their legitimacy with the wider population, they still held real power, retained certain customs, influenced chinese dressing (the cheongsam) and even tried imposing some of their cultural norms on the entire population. the queue hairstyle for men, and less successfully, the attempt to ban foot-binding for women (that's one thing where i'm "really? you guys should've already cut that bullshit out centuries ago" @ the ancestors 😔). so, to me this is very far from a situation where a nation dies.

in my view of chinese history, there have been times when yao, as an empire, (like rome or persia) has ended or absorbed other nations. the southwards expansion of the han dynasty, for example: the disappearance of the "baiyue" tribes, through conquest, settlers and sinicisation (the totality of that cultural conquest always struck me—that we don't even know what they called themselves today). the conquest of vietnam is one instance where that didn't happen—and even more so for qing china, where manchuria is the one calling the shots. and i don't see a nation adopting some aspects of another nation's culture = death precisely because all cultures change. there's that joke classicists have made about "did the romans conquer greece, or did the greeks conquer rome?" given how much they adopted greek culture aesthetics but we wouldn't say "the romans were not a distinct cultural entity" either. naturally, there are big differences between the qing and roman empires, but most empires weren't above adopting some customs of those they conquered—it's indeed often how successful incorporation worked.

it's also about characterisation and narrative choices for me too; imo yao saw the opium wars as a doubled humiliation. being subject to the "western barbarians"—while being ruled by other "barbarians"; yao's pride is one thing that is stubborn, and he'll cling to the shreds of it. my immediate thought is that if manchuria isn't a separate character, a lot of this narrative loses the force; when it comes to how i'd translate the history into interactions between all these eldritch beings. this is especially when i'm thinking of the subsequent anti-qing movements; and how folks like sun yat-sen laid the blame for china's downfall at the hands of western empires on the manchu ruling dynasty and even characterised them as a colonial force ultimately hobbling china's progress (even if of course, irl history is more complex and there were manchu officials/figures who supported republicanism and the end of the regime). so in this context, to me it's best represented as a multi-layered power struggle between yao, manchuria and of course all the other western nations.

so overall, while history can always be interpreted and translated into hetalia many ways, and i wouldn't say there's a definitive "right" or "wrong" criteria when translating it into whether a hetalia personification dies or endures— personally, it makes the most sense for me if manchuria is a separate character during this era for all the abovementioned reasons. nations after all, aren't states, with all that strict international legal criteria about what a "legitimate" state is—but imagined communities. hetalia personifications are that idea extended further— given flesh and incarnated by the dreams, beliefs and imagination of humans: they're fluid and ambiguous—but also resilient, because it's not so easy to kill an idea.

[blueskywater-happiness]

A quick doodle for a weird au I was thinking about, Hoshi no Ko and Hetalia :)

Nyo America as Hoshino Ai

Philippines as Hoshino Ruby

Molossia as Hoshino Aqua

[peonycats]

I have a question. Would you consider Manchuria a separate character from China, due to Pre-Qing Manchuria history? If so, how do you think their relationship between Canon China, especially after the Manchus took over during the Qing Dynasty?

Yessiree! Manchuria's still running around as the personification of the manchu people, prbly bragging about how she used to rule the worldddddd or smth

(jurchen is prbly her dad or mom or smth?? havent decided...)

)-)o Manchu-Han ties are... pretty complicated to get into but I think during Qing dynasty was definitely a lot of resentful submission ("Another northern steppe barbarian? cmon") to Manchuria on China's part, biting back his retorts and keeping his head down, for the time being. At the best of times, he would acknowledge when something she did was commendable and furthered both their ambitions, whether it was military or cultural; but I think like with like a lot of things in life, in China's heart of hearts, he would never acknowledge her as an equal, only someone who was previously uncultured, and then took his own, enlightened culture for her own to remake herself in *his* image 😩

post qing dynasty and the world wars and the current state of chinese ethnic minority relations is a whole nother can of worms that i dont feel like getting into for now hdsfjjds

[tianshiisdead]

On loanwords.

First panel references Japanese loaning of Chinese characters early on. The next 3 are from ~1920s, Second is Chinese intellectual loaning of Japanese words for western technology/political and social concepts after attending university in Japan like so many of them did back then, often through borrowing Japanese created character combinations and bringing them back to China to pronounce as you'd expect in Chinese, leading to even commonly used words like the word for phone and the word for society being borrowed from Japanese. Third and fourth are Japanese loanwords in Dongbei dialect (incl Dalian specific ones), that are more commonly transliterations of Japanese words born from direct and relatively longer term colonization, words picked up by lower class and farmers living alongside Japanese settlers and soldiers.

It's interesting to look at different loanwords. You can see the movements of power and people clearly through the contrasts

[tianshiisdead]

Korea - Jurchen/Manchu relations go crazy

[tianshiisdead]

Before I sleeby here's an old messy thing I never posted of a Jurchen girl